Lungs and Penguins; But Not Penguins' Lungs

I have returned to the wonderful town of Columbia after a successful trip to Ft. Leonard Wood and back yesterday. My plenary talk went quite well. And although I didn't see any earth-shattering presentations or hear of any bewilderingly awesome research, I did meet some really nice people. I had hoped to at least have a few nuggets from my day at Leonard Wood to discuss on this blog, but alas, I returned with very little noteworthy nerd-stuff.

I will say this: Ft. Leonard Wood is a strange place. Everyone wears the same outfit. They travel in large groups, often singing monotonous chants in unison. And perhaps I'm the only one who finds this odd, but despite the fact that the fort does not cover an overtly large area, everyone drives everywhere they go. Even though the early summer weather yesterday was seasonably mild, I did not see a single person walking or riding a bike.

With the understanding that my previous post was fairly scant and lacking any real substance, I am unfortunately going to have to leave this post in the same state. My day of travel was quite tiring and I'm having a hard time focusing, or for even functioning for that matter, today. Maybe my next post should be on the science of sleep; perhaps I'll learn a thing or two and will be able to stay alert enough to keep this blog going. I will, however, leave you with two items of interest before I fall asleep at my desk. The first item (actually, two items combined into one) is an article on creating lungs in a laboratory. The two studies that are featured in the article were both published in Science, and describe two methods for engineering a lung, or at least a device that performs a similar function. The first study is actually a biologically engineered lung, in which lung tissue was decullularized, and then the decelled platform was subsequently reseeded with lung cells. The cells, using the extracellular matrix of the decellularized platform as a guide, grew into the correct positions so that the lung was effectively recreated. The second study was a microfluidic device, wherein the fluidic channel was lined with lung cells. Outside of the channel were blood capillaries, which gave each device the function of a single alveolus of the lung. Both studies were pretty cool and I'm constantly amazed at the advances in tissue engineering. And generally speaking, both of these were pretty big advances.

The second item that I would like to leave you with is a video of a penguin that I took while at the Shedd Aquarium last month. Why? Because penguins are totally awesome!

Enjoy!

Filler and Fluff

As is becoming the norm with this blog, I have found myself quite busy recently and unable to update as much as I would like. So busy, actually, that I didn't even realize that I had forgotten to post last week until this morning. It was kind of like I forgot that I forgot, which is sort of paradoxical.

Anyways, my reason (not excuse; they're totally different. Duh.) for mismanaging my blog was that, firstly, I was working on a grant proposal late last week that ended up taking considerably more time than I had initially thought, and, secondly, that I am preparing to present at an upcoming conference. The conference that I will be attending is the International Symposium on Spectral Sensing Research (ISSSR), which is sponsored by the U.S. Army and is being hosted by Missouri State University, Jordan Valley Innovation Center, and Fort Leonard Wood. If you are familiar with Missouri geography, you might notice that, while MSU and JVIC are both located in Springfield, Fort Leonard Wood is something like 100 miles away. So their solution is to bus the entire conference to Fort Leonard Wood for the presentations that are taking place there.

While this certainly seems considerably troublesome, it certainly works out well for me. Here's why: my research was selected for a plenary talk. If, like me, you're not quite sure of what this means, the dictionary is a wonderful aid. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, plenary means 'attended by all qualified members.' This means that there will be no concurrent sessions with my presentation, and that all of the conference attendees will be present for my talk. Boil it down to brass tax, and you can conclude that this presentation is a pretty big deal. However, until I was informed that my abstract had been selected for a plenary talk, I had not planned on even attending the conference because of more pressing concerns here in Columbia. And so after a pow-wow with my advisors, it was decided that I would register and attend just long enough to give my talk and shake some hands and then return home. Luckily, the plenary talks are being given at Fort Leonard Wood, not in Springfield, and so the early morning pilgrimage that I will have to make will only be the two-hour trip from Columbia to Fort Leonard Wood, as opposed to the three-hour trip from Columbia to Springfield.

Although I'm not certain that I'll be sticking around for any of the other talks, I'm hoping to meet some big-time sort of people; military and national lab program directors and the like. And perhaps by keeping my ears open, I'll be able to post later this week or next week on some of the cool stuff going on in the field of spectroscopic sensing research.

Would They Be Called Titanians?

(Artist's rendering of the 2005 landing of Huygens probe on Titan)

For those of you fascinated by the possibility extraterrestrial life, word is circulating quickly of new studies on Titan, one of the moons that orbits Saturn. These studies, which are being reported by ScienceNews, as well as being a topic of discussion on today's Science Friday, indicate that some form of life may be taking in compounds that are created in Titan's atmosphere in a respiration-like process.

Using spectrometry data from the Cassini spacecraft (which I've written about before in another post), along with some fancy computer modeling, researchers have discovered that compounds that were expected to be found on or near the surface of the moon are generally absent. One way of explaining this phenomenon is that organisms living on the surface are consuming these compounds. This sounds vague and somewhat implausable, but it seem to be a reasonable hypothesis. The reason that this theory holds water is that two separate studies were performed that examined separate compounds. The compounds, acetylene, ethane, and hydrogen make up a kind of bizarre-O version of Earth's nitrogen cycle, wherein methane and acetylene are broken down by UV radiation in the atmosphere to form various byproducts, including hydrogen and more acetylene (from the breakdown of methane). The heavier compounds then fall down toward the surface of the moon, where they are unexpectedly absent from spectral analysis. The reason? Maybe, just maybe, organisms on the surface of the planet are gobbling those molecules up for food. It's also unclear how the initial compounds are reconstituted in the atmosphere, which could also be handily explained by a respiration-ish process; kind of like how we help reconstitute carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as we exhale.

Pretty wild stuff.

All in all, I thought these studies were pretty cool. I haven't had a chance to listen to the SciFri podcast from today's show, but I'm looking forward to checking it out. I have to admit, though, that my fascination with alien life is pretty lacking. In fact, when asked if I believe that there is life beyond our planet, I've replied with a meager shrug and a poorly enunciated 'I dunno,' which sounded more like 'uh-Uh-uh.' It certainly is the stuff of inspiration and awe for many, but I'll save my concern for when we find out that the alien life that we've been searching for looks something like this:
I just hope that, when that day comes, Sigourney Weaver is up to the challenge...

Check It Out!

I'm very pleased to announce that today's post is all about informing you, the reader, of things that are going on that you, the reader, can see for yourself.

C'mon, let's check it out.

The first little tidbit is that the planets Venus, Mars, and Saturn will all be visible in the same night sky this month. The locations of the planets in the sky, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, are described in an article at Space.com, which also describes the planets' movements over the weeks and months ahead until they are no longer visible. This week, though, will provide a particularly nice view of our Sun-orbiting brethren, given a sufficient lack of clouds. If, like me, you have a hard time following the article's description of the planets' locations, there is also a link to a handy image that illustrates the positions of each planet in the western evening sky. For your convenience, I have stolen the image and posted it below.


While I was piddling around at Space.com, I was also reminded that tomorrow is the scheduled test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. Some of you may remember that I've written about the Falcon 9 in a past post, which can be found here. The Falcon 9 is the vehicle that is slated to take the place of the retiring space shuttle, so this test launch is a pretty big deal. And I must say that I'm very excited about it. Especially since you can get live updates and information about the test launch at SpaceX's website, and what's even cooler is that they will be streaming a live webcast of the launch, which is scheduled to occur at 10:00 am tomorrow (Friday, June 4th). The webcast will go live 20 minutes before launch, at 9:40 am.

Let me repeat that: At 9:40 tomorrow morning, click right here to see a live webcast of the first test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.